Chapter Twenty Four

  For one wonderful minute when Jeremy woke up, he didn’t remember what had happened the day before.

  He opened his eyes to find that his room was pitch bck. Odd, but not inexplicable. It must still have been the middle of the night, and the streetlight by his window had gone out. His eyes flicked toward his digital clock to see what time it was, but it was nowhere to be seen. A twinge of unease pinched his heart, but he ignored it. The power was out, that’s all it was. A thunderstorm must have struck while he was asleep.

  In the back of his mind, he knew that wasn’t true. He could feel the memories trying to worm their way back into his consciousness as the fog of sleep evaporated, threatening to pull him back into reality and…

  Who the fme was in his bed with him?

  Miranda.

  And with that, the dam broke and the events of the previous day came flooding back into his mind. He lurched upright with a ragged gasp as images of giant snakes, tree people, and hooved women fshed before his eyes.

  “Brighteyes!”

  Jeremy recoiled in surprise when Miranda sprang out of the bed, a blue fsh signalling that she had summoned one of her knives. Two pinpricks of yellow light appeared in the darkness, frantically swinging back and forth. They fell on him, and then disappeared as Miranda turned away.

  ”Spark!” she said, and the oil mp lit up. A moment ter, she was on her knees next to the bed, reaching for him. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  The unnatural glow had disappeared from her eyes, but nothing could hide the horns poking up from her hair. Jeremy stared at them, the lingering hope that this had all been a nightmare withering and dying in the cold light of reality.

  He pressed his hand against his chest, begging his galloping heart to slow down before it broke his ribs.

  “Jeremy?”

  “I’m…” He paused, then forced himself to take a breath. “I’m okay. I just…had a bad dream.”

  That was a lie. The dream had been wonderfully mundane. It was waking up that horrified him.

  Relief flooded Miranda’s face, and she leaned forward to hug him. “Don’t scare me like that! I thought something had happened to you!”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  Miranda got up. “Well, it’s about time to get up anyway. Come on, let’s go get something to eat.”

  His stomach let out a growl, as if it were agreeing with her, and it suddenly struck Jeremy just how hungry he was. He’d been so caught up in having his life turned upside down the day before that eating had been the st thing on his mind. Even if he’d tried, with the hurricane of emotions that had been careening around inside him, he doubted he could have kept anything down anyway.

  Shock and disbelief couldn’t stave off the needs of the human body forever, though, and right then his stomach was so empty that it felt like it was trying to digest itself. As his pulse finally returned to normal and the adrenaline in his veins began to fade, he nodded.

  Grinning, Miranda summoned her hat and cloak, then stopped and took his hands in her own.

  “You have no idea how excited I am,” she said, her eyes positively sparkling. “All these years, the only thing I’ve wanted was to have you back. I can’t wait to show you…well, everything!”

  Jeremy didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm, but if yesterday was any indication of what an average day on Nyr was like, then he couldn’t understand how anyone could be excited about anything this godforsaken pce had to offer.

  No, that wasn’t true. The fact that Miranda enjoyed living here made a little too much sense. This was exactly the kind of insanity that she would have fallen head over heels for. He just didn’t understand how anyone who wasn’t a stark, raving lunatic could feel anything besides dread and a looming sense of disaster every time they looked out the window.

  A pit formed in his stomach—which unfortunately did nothing to fill it—at the thought of having to fight any of the things he had seen yesterday. Some of them he had been easy enough to identify, even if they chipped off a little piece of his sanity every time he spotted one. They’d passed more than one goblin patrol—one of them had even chased them until Miranda threw a handful of caltraps on the ground behind them.

  Slimes were absolutely everywhere, looking like giant multicolored drops of dew that moved on their own. At one point, Miranda had dragged him into the underbrush when a two headed wolf emerged to drink from a nearby spring. One of its heads had remained upright and alert while the other drank. Jeremy was even fairly certain that a dragon, or something close to it, had flown right above the treetops a little before noon.

  Miranda hadn’t even gnced up at it.

  But then there were the truly strange things. He’d spotted what looked like a headless bear with white fur and yellow stripes. The pce where its neck should have been was just a gaping maw from which writhing tentacles emerged. The box that popped up had named it a LEVEL 20 ELECTRIFIED MA’LUK. Miranda had tensed up when it turned to face them—it didn’t have eyes that Jeremy could see—but it had just made a strange mooing sound before lumbering off in the other direction.

  A little while ter, they had come across a colony of LEVEL 2 MINOR SLENIKS, which were furry little things that looked like a cross between a squirrel and a snake. They dragged themselves around with their arms, but their back halves were nothing but long, furry tails that tapered down to a point. The rgest of them was barely two feet long, but Miranda had used her silver dagger to warp them away as soon as they’d started gathering around Jeremy.

  Miranda had promised him that he would never have to fight once they reached her guild’s home base, but she had also mentioned that it’d taken her almost a week to get here. That was a lot of time for things to go wrong—and knowing Miranda, they would go wrong.

  He didn’t doubt for a second that she was going to do everything in her power to keep him safe, but…well, she was Miranda Jackdaw. Camity followed her everywhere she went, nipping at her heels like a pyful little puppy. Stick around her for long, and eventually you were going to trip over it.

  They left the room and headed downstairs, and Jeremy was surprised at how unsurprised he was to see sunlight streaming in through the windows. It felt like he had barely slept for an hour, and both his body and brain were begging for more.

  Miranda, however, had an unmistakable spring in her step. Part of that was because of her hooves, which naturally gave her a lighter and bouncier gait, but she didn’t seem able to take more than two steps without gncing back at him. Every time she did, the glow in her eyes took him by surprise—not the magical glow she’d had earlier, but something that came from even deeper inside her.

  This was a woman who’d finally been given the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the universe. She had said as much a dozen times, but seeing the way stars seemed to dance in her eyes every time she looked at him, it dawned on him how much this meant to her in a way he hadn’t understood before.

  They reached the common room on the first floor of the inn, and Jeremy saw that Duncan the innkeeper was already standing behind the bar, ready to serve. Maybe he had never left. That hollow smile and vacant stare definitely looked like someone who had gone the past thirteen years without a wink of sleep.

  And you were just compining about only getting to sleep for eight hours, he thought with a twinge of guilt.

  “Hey,” Miranda said, rapping her knuckles on the bar in front of him, “we want breakfast. Hop to it!”

  “We sell food for—”

  “Too expensive.”

  “We sell food for one gold coin!”

  “Done.”

  A coin appeared in her hand, and she flipped it so that it nded on the bar. It bounced once off of the hard wooden surface before coming to rest, and then vanished. It didn’t fsh blue the way things did when Miranda took them in and out of her inventory. It simply…ceased to be.

  “Thank you kindly!” Duncan said, bustling into the kitchen.

  Miranda swept through the common room, her cloak fluttering behind her, ignoring the dozens of open tables she passed. There were no other people in the inn besides them—which wasn’t to say they were alone. The other tables merely had NPCs sitting at them.

  Jeremy paused. The ease with which that thought had passed through his mind was disturbing, as if he were simply commenting on the weather. And yet, when he turned to look at the man sitting at the table next to him…

  He was dressed in peasants’ clothing, and was spooning a bowl of gray, lumpy oatmeal into his mouth with mechanical apathy. It was obvious from the unchanging expression on his face that he wasn’t tasting a single bite of it. Even as Jeremy watched, the mass of soggy oats slid from his spoon and nded back in the bowl with a wet spt. The man put the spoon in his mouth anyway, robotically chewing and swallowing the mouthful of nothing before scooping up another bite.

  Not knowing what he was doing, Jeremy reached out and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Um, hi,” he said as the man’s head turned to look at him. Even the way he moved reminded Jeremy of a cheap animatronic on an amusement park ride. “I just wanted to ask—”

  “My father always told me, a field of good dirt is worth more than a mountain of gold!”

  Jeremy blinked. “I…what?”

  The man went back to his meal. Jeremy stared at him, equal parts horrified and fascinated. The creature sitting in front him looked exactly like a person. It was made of flesh and bones like a person. It could even talk like a person. And yet, something in his brain squirmed in disgust every time he used the word person to describe it.

  This wasn’t a person. This was a robot made of meat. It was…

  It’s what you were less than twelve hours ago, he thought, and revulsion caused his insides to seize up.

  “What are you waiting for?” Miranda called, yanking Jeremy out of his thoughts.

  She had chosen a table near the far wall, in a spot where nobody would be able to see them from the windows. She was also sitting, Jeremy noted, where she could watch the inn’s front door and duck behind the bar if she needed to.

  She hadn’t said a word about it to him, but she clearly wasn’t as confident about how long it would take Miles and his goons to find them as she’d said. Still, even ominous thoughts like that were preferable to the existential crisis that looking at the man—who was still methodically scraping his spoon against the inside of an empty bowl—was giving him.

  “So,” he said as he sat down across from her, trying to sound like he wasn’t struggling to comprehend his pce in this new and terrifying universe, “what do we do now?”

  “Well, first things first,” Miranda said, “you need to pick a css.”

  Jeremy blinked, suddenly reminded of the white letters in the corner of his vision.

  PICK YOUR CLASS AND BEGIN YOUR JOURNEY.

  It had been there ever since he and Miranda had escaped the fight outside the cave, although it had shrunk so that it wasn’t taking up as much of his vision as it had at first. With everything else that had been going on, he had completely forgotten about it.

  “We usually try to keep our Noncoms at—”

  “Your what?” Jeremy interrupted her.

  “Our Noncoms. It’s short for Noncombatants, the ones the guild wakes up.” She shrugged. “We usually try to keep them at level one. The lower your level, the less XP you need to power your System.”

  “Oh,” the level four Hero mumbled, looking away. “Sorry.”

  Miranda burst out ughing. “You really haven’t changed at all, have you? Sorry for what? For saving my a…my aaaa…my skin back there?”

  Jeremy raised an eyebrow. “Are you okay?”

  She waved dismissively. “Apparently whoever’s behind the Remaking is a total puritan. See for yourself. Try and cuss.”

  “Um, okay,” he said hesitantly. “Ashes!”

  He blinked.

  “Ashes!” he excimed, raising a hand to his throat. “Ashes! Ashes and fme! What the fme is wrong with me?”

  “Get used to it,” Miranda said with a smirk. “That’s probably the worst thing about this pce. No matter how mad you get at it, you’ll never be able to tell it how you really feel.”

  “Da…Daaaa…” he shook his head, more confused now than ever. He could still think the words in his head, but when he tried to say them out loud it was like something else took control of his mouth, forcing him to say something else entirely.

  “Don’t give yourself a stroke over this,” Miranda chided him. “Trust me, you’re going to want to save that anger for ter.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she pulled out her silver dagger and idly began spinning it on top of the table like a top. The minutes stretched on, quickly becoming uncomfortable, but still she didn’t say anything.

  “Miranda?” Jeremy finally prompted her.

  “I’m thinking,” she muttered. “I wanted this for so long, but now that it’s finally happening, I’m realizing that I didn’t pn this out at all. I have no idea where to even start!”

  “Well, where did the person who taught you start?”

  She snorted. “Nobody taught me. When the Remaking happened, I found myself in the middle of a camp of sleeping goblins. I tried to sneak away, but they woke up and chased me for almost five miles. I only managed to lose them by jumping over a waterfall. It nearly killed me.”

  “Oh,” Jeremy said, staring at her in horror. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “It was some of the most fun I’d ever had.”

  He sighed. “Right. I forgot who I was talking to.”

  “That’s what made me decide to pick Thief as my css.” She grinned and leaned in conspiratorially. “The thrill of being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to, knowing that one wrong move was going to bring the whole world down on me? I wanted more, and I wanted to get even better at it. So this was the perfect css for me.”

  “And that’s where you got your, uh,” Jeremy gestured awkwardly at her horns, “that?”

  She shook her head. “No, that came ter. You don’t get to change your race until you hit level ten. But since you asked, yes, I did become a Faun because it complemented my css. It gives me plus three in Dexterity, and plus two to Influence—and that’s in addition to the plus two to Dexterity and plus one to Spirit I get just for being a Cat Burgr.”

  “I, uh…” Jeremy shook his head. “You lost me.”

  Before Miranda could reply, Duncan sauntered over and deposited two ptes of food in front of them.

  “Thank you kindly!” he said before turning and making his way back to the bar, where he proceeded to do an admirable impersonation of a statue.

  Jeremy looked at the ptes in surprise. They were positively heaped with food, and every bit of it looked delicious. A thick, juicy slice of ham sat beside half a dozen fried eggs. Two buttery, fky biscuits sat on the edge of the pte, next to a pile of the goldest, crunchiest looking hashbrowns he had ever seen. There was also an apple, a pear, and a lump of some kind of white cheese.

  Miranda wasted no time in digging in. Using her silver dagger like a fork, she quickly speared the slice of ham—still steaming from the pan—and crammed the entire thing into her mouth before tearing open one of the biscuits and piling eggs and potatoes onto it. Once the sandwich was almost six inches tall, she took a bite, and runny yellow yolk cascaded down onto her pte.

  Jeremy hesitated. While the food certainly looked amazing, knowing that it had been made by an NPC gave him pause. He could see only too clearly Duncan reaching for the salt, and grabbing a box of rat poison instead. Or going to his rder and pulling out two diseased, maggot-covered slices of ham before throwing them on the frying pan.

  Miranda’s been doing this for over a decade, he reminded himself, watching her eat for a few seconds. That obviously hasn’t happened to her yet.

  I hope.

  He picked up his fork and knife and began to eat. The food was every bit as good as it looked, and it only took a few bites for him to stop worrying about where it came from.

  “I guess that’s as good a pce to start as any,” Miranda finally said.

  Jeremy looked up at her, confused. “What is?”

  “Picking your css. I chose to become a Thief because it overpped with what I enjoyed doing. It complimented my natural talents.”

  “I thought you were a Cat Burgr.”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “I am. All Cat Burgrs are Thieves, but not all Thieves are Cat Burgrs. But we’ll get into that ter. For now, that’s what I want you to focus on: finding a css that synergizes with who you are as a person.”

  “I thought I wasn’t going to be doing any fighting,” he said, trepidation rising up inside him.

  “You’re not, but there are plenty of support csses where you don’t need to be out on the front lines.” She smirked. “We’ll find a way to make you useful no matter what you pick, so don’t think you can get out of work by choosing the most worthless css you can find.”

  Jeremy couldn’t help but chuckle ruefully. “Well, then I may as well just pick something randomly. You know as well as I do that the only thing I was ever good at was making robots, and something tells me there’s not a huge demand for that around here.”

  “Maybe not, but here’s the thing about Nyr: it has a way of bringing out talents you never knew you had.” She grinned at him. “For example, I never knew I was any good at pickpocketing before the Remaking, and now look!”

  She held up her hand, and a coin purse materialized in it.

  “Whose is that?” Jeremy asked suspiciously.

  “Mine.”

  Jeremy narrowed his eyes, and Miranda rolled hers.

  “It’s the innkeeper’s, okay? What’s the big deal? I’m a Cat Burgr. This is what I do. If he knew I’d done it, he’d have called the guards already.”

  The purse disappeared back into her inventory, and she quickly sent her fruit and cheese to join it.

  “Anyway,” she went on, wiping her dagger off on a napkin, “you should spend the morning looking over your options. There’s a lot of them—way more than you’d ever think was possible. There’s got to be something in there you’d be good at!”

  “Like what?” he challenged her. “I can’t fight, I can barely run ten feet without passing out, and—”

  “How about building?”

  Jeremy stopped, surprised.

  “You love building stuff,” Miranda said. “Even before you started making robots, you would spend so long making those stupid Lego sets that you’d forget to eat.”

  “They weren’t stupid!” Jeremy protested.

  “So start there. Try to find as many csses as you can that’ll let you build things. Spend a few hours going over them, and we’ll talk more when I get back.”

  She stood up, and Jeremy blinked in surprise. “Back? Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got to pick up some supplies for the trip.” She leaned in and gave him a quick kiss. “Hopefully I’ll only be gone for a couple of hours. Finish your breakfast, then go back to the room and wait for me. And look over the csses, okay?”

  “I guess. But…” Jeremy said, but his voice trailed off when Miranda turned and dashed out of the inn, her cape fpping dramatically behind her. “Okay, then.”

  He sighed and looked at his food. He’d eaten less than half of it, but suddenly his appetite was gone. The common room felt ominously quiet now that it was just him in here.

  Him…and the NPCs.

  None of them made any threatening movements, or even gnced his way, but Jeremy’s heart leaped up into his throat anyway. Springing to his feet, he sprinted all the way back to his room, smming and locking the door behind him.

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